3 brilliant updates to invoicing and payments

Creating clean, professional invoices that have all the details your customer needs to understand the service you’ve provided and what it costs is one of the most important things you must do to run a successful field service business. Of course, they mean nothing if you aren’t collecting payments on time and through a channel that your customers are comfortable and happy with.

The complexities of invoicing and payment collection have been a problem for field service businesses for decades. With Commusoft’s management software, the processes become uniform, simplified and streamlined.

To make invoicing and payments even easier, we’ve introduced three exciting new updates.

Hover-over breakdown on final invoices for work addresses

When you create a final invoice for a work address in Commusoft, you can now view a breakdown of its details from the property page. You will see a grey box reading ‘Invoiced’ next to the job in the history section of the property page. If you hover over this box with your cursor, a pop-up bubble will appear with a breakdown.

This little update means that you can see at a glance who still owes you money from a final invoice, saving you having to open it. A big thanks to SA Hancock Ltd who suggested this feature. If there’s a change you would like to see in Commusoft, you can suggest it on our knowledge base.

Payment charges now appear in a separate invoice

There are a couple of things you need to make sure are set up before you can see the benefits of this new feature. Firstly, you’ll need to have your Commusoft app integrated with either Stripe or Worldpay. These companies allow you to process payments online.

You’ll then need to access the system settings and apply a charge to a payment type. You can do this by selecting ‘Card charges’ and following the instructions in the web app. In the example below, we’ve added a 2% charge to a credit card payment of £140.40.

Even when you’ve explicitly told a customer that a particular payment type will be subjected to a charge, there are often queries when it comes to the final invoice. This update means that card charges are clearly marked, and can be viewed in a separate invoice. Hopefully reducing the number of awkward conversations you have to have!

Take card details when booking a job

This great new feature is ideal for those smaller jobs that would cost more to debt-chase than they’re worth to your business. You may also come across customers that, for whatever reason, never really intended to pay. If you have a feeling you might be about to book a job for a customer like that, asking for their card details is a good way to weed them out — they’re unlikely to offer them up if they don’t want to accept any charges!

Again, you’ll need to have your Stripe or Worldpay account linked to Commusoft in order to take advantage of this feature. You’ll then need to turn it on from system settings. You can do this by selecting ‘Credit card details’ in the jobs section. You’ll then be presented with three options.

You can choose to make recording card details optional or mandatory, or you can choose to not record them at all.

Once you’ve switched it on, you will see a new section at the bottom of the screen when you book a job.

Once the card details are attached to the job, you can bill them after sending an invoice.

We hope you enjoy using these new features and that you have a great experience with Commusoft. If you would like to leave us a review, you can do so on Capterra.